Happy Birthday
by PhoenixoftheLostandForgotten
Summary: Nothing good ever happened on birthdays. Specifically, nothing good happened on Jim Kirk's birthdays. An account of Jim's birthdays throughout his lifetime. Not for the light of heart.


Nothing good ever happened on birthdays.

More specifically, on Jim Kirk's birthdays.

The day he had been born, a Romulan ship from an alternate reality popped up from out of nowhere. They had killed the captain of the _USS_ _Kelvin_, forcing his own father to assume command. George Kirk evacuated the ship, all eight hundred crew members. Everyone but himself. The to-be hero decided that the only way the escape pods would make it was to fight the_ Narada_ all by his lonesome. He was right in the end, of course, but that wasn't the point. The point was that he forced his wife, Winona, to deliver their child alone, and then made her listen to him die immediately afterwards. Needless to say, that hadn't earned Jim any brownie points in his family.

It was his eighth birthday when his brother, Sam, ran away. Sam and their step-father, Frank, had gotten into an argument. It was, ironically, about how Sam thought he could live on his own. He was sixteen at the time, so it was perfecltly normal for him to want a taste of independence. Insults and accusations were thrown, along with more physical and corporeal objects, mostly bottles of Jack and the occasional wrench. So, Sam left. He walked out the door, and he never looked back. The beatings from Frank only got worse afterwards, and Jim had to go to the hospital more than once. Of course, everyone just brushed it off as childhood clumsiness, and Frank wasn't about to admit to child abuse. Winona took her husband's side, and the few times she was home she'd tell him to be more careful.

On his twelfth birthday, he drove his father's (not step-fathers, mind you, his real father's) antique Corvette off a cliff. Frank had ordered him to wash it, presumably so that he could sell it (Winona obviously wasn't earning enough money at her job to support his drinking habits). Well, when Jim was done washing, he noticed the keys hanging on a peg. He paused, thinking for only a moment before he snatched them off the hook, jammed them into the ignition, and hit the gas pedal. He tore through the streets like a madman, not realizing and not particularly caring where he was going. He answered Frank's call when it came, and dismissed it just as easily. He shouted a greeting to his friend, Johnny, as he ripped past, leaving him (literally) in the dust. He saw a cop pull onto the road and start chasing him, so he gunned the engine even further. He drove through a locked gate and into the quarry. He turned to face the spot where they were digging, driving directly towards it. He waited until he was only a few yards from the edge, then he hit the emergency brake, turned the car away, and jumped out. He slid back towards the cliff, clawing at the dirt to slow him down. He finally slipped over th edge and managed to stop himself, pulling himself up through willpower alone. When the officer that was pursuing him asked him his name, he gave it, standing straight and tall. When he showed up on Frank's doorstep accompanied by two police officers, it was the last straw for his mother. Out of control, she said. Needed to learn how to respect others. They (she and Frank) decided to send him to Tarsus IV to live with his mother's sister, Emily. For your own good, they said. Help you with your issues. He knew thst they were just trying to get rid of him. Apparently sending him to another planet was the only way to deal with him. He was on a shuttlecraft the next day.

His fourteenth birthday marked the start of the Tarsus IV massacre. There had been so many signs. At first, everything had been perfect. He had a family that loved him, a school that actually taught him things, and real, honest-to-God friends. Then the fungus started to grow. The crops started to die, people got thinner and thinner, and one day, Kodos called them all to the square. At first, everyone was confused. But when he started giving his speech, it started to make sense. _The revolution is successful. But survival depends on drastic measures. Your existence represents a threat to the continued well-being of society. Your lives mean slow death to the more valued members of the colony. Therefore, I have no alternative but to sentence you to death. Your execution is so ordered, signed Kodos, Governor on Tarsus IV. _Then the guards opened fire. Old-fashioned bullets clouded the air, tearing through flesh and bone alike. Phasers were fired as well, their bright beams only serving to illuminate the carnage. Unlike the guns, the phasers simply vaporized the colonists, the dust of the dead adding to the clouds of smoke made by the guns. Jim dropped to the ground and crawled out of the crowd. He tried to ignore the lifeless eyes of the dead and the pleading ones of the dying. He tried to ignore the sobbing and the screaming and the gasping breaths of the living and almost-dead. He tried to ignore the fact that the dirt he was crawling through was his neighbors, the fact that the dust that coated his throat was once his friends. He forced himself to crawl away from the bleeding, bloody bodies. Over the next eight months, he gathered about twenty-three survivors. All children. Some were older, and some were younger than him, but he took care of them nonetheless. Among the survivors were his friends Kevin Riley, who was six, and Tom Leighton, who was seventeen. Jim (or JT, as he was known) was fourteen. He wouldn't go so far as to say that things were going well for his little group, but they were surviving. Then they got caught. One of the older kids, a Vulcan named T'Pol, had sold them out to Kodos in exchange for his own life. Once they were all caught, he was killed anyway. Some good his logic did him there, huh? Long story short, they were tortured, they escaped. Well, some of them. They went in with twenty-three children. They walked out with twelve. Three weeks later, Starfleet finally showed up. By that time, three more had died, and the others were inching ever closer. Tom had taken a phaser blast to the face, and he probably wouldn't last the night. JT himself had a bullet lodged in his shoulder. Anyway, Starfleet popped up, all sympathy and warmth, and took them back to Earth. Even after Jim went back to Iowa, all he got were pitying looks. So, he worked on even harder on making himself a nuisance. Later, he started using alcohol and sex as escapes. Eventually, people forgot about Tarsus. But he never did.

It was his twenty-sixth birthday when Vulcan was destroyed. Of course, everyone forgot about menial things like birthdays in the face of such a terrible tradgedy, and he didn't blame them. He almost forget about it himself. And so another six billion were added to his birthday death toll. He had to admit, though. He never thought that he'd drag an entire planet down with him. Actually, he could probably count all the people killed by Nero on his list. It was all one collective casualty list in the end, wasn't it?

So, whenever his birthday would roll around, he would ignore it all day and get drunk at night. Anyone who noticed probably assumed it was because of what happened with the _Kelvin_. Well, they were partly right.

But the real reason that Jim hated birthdays wasn't because of the _Kelvin_, or Vulcan, or even Tarsus. It was because people always died on his birthday. And Jim got drunk because _hey, if he was drunk, he couldn't kill anyone else, right?_


End file.
